Don Pendleton - The Hostaged Island

Putting the radio in his pocket, the biker crawled between the cars. He heard a single rifle slug whap through the car beside him. A tracer flashed by his face like a streak of fire.

The gasoline beneath him burst into flame.

Motorcycles roared around the curve at Lover's Cove and accelerated on the straightway. Approaching the seaplane terminal, the thick smoke forced them to slow. The five bikers heard only sporadic firing. As they pulled into the parking lot, stopping far from the burning cars, they saw something run toward them.

A flaming Outlaw was staggering, thrashing, lurching through the smoke. His eyes were gone, his open mouth a hole of darkness from which came an animal groan.

Charlie pulled his pistol and fired twice into the faceless head. Then Charlie himself flew back, a stream of .308 slugs ripping across his chest. Merciless engagement.

High in the corrugated steel warehouse, near the roofline, a muzzle kept flashing, the points of light bright through the black sooty smoke. The newly arrived bikers had only time to lift their eyes toward the M-60 before the slugs found them. Inaccurate because of the smoke, the stream of slugs sought no targets. The machinegunner simply swept the fire over them, firing indiscriminately.

The .308 slugs smashed knees and skulls, punched holes through the motorcycles, tore through lungs and hearts to destroy the fiberglass LAAW rocket tubes slung across the Outlaws' backs. Slugs pocked the asphalt, found flesh, ricocheted from engine blocks.

One biker, as a slug shattered his leg, threw himself sideways and dragged himself out of the kill zone. He watched as the steady stream of slugs stitched across the parking lot again and again, shooting the dead all over again, spilling entrails, giving corpses sudden movement.

The biker braced himself and struggled to remove the LAAW rocket from his back. He was almost unconscious from his leg's pain. Every move brought agony like he'd never known. He heard shrieking, did not realize his own throat made the sounds. But he got the rocket off his back.

The M-60 had quit. From the area around the warehouse, a shotgun fired: one shot, two shots, then a pause.

Laying still on his back, the one surviving biker from Charlie's rescue squad struggled to deal with the LAAW rocket's extension tube. Finally he pulled it out, and saw the sight flip up.

He heard boots running toward him. He saw above him an Outlaw holding an assault rifle. But his vision swam, he could not recognize the Outlaw's face.

"Just in time," said the Outlaw standing above him. "We've been waiting for the rockets."

"Here," the biker gasped, offering the LAAW rocket.

The Outlaw carefully accepted the ready-to-fire rocket launcher.

"Kill them!" the dying biker spat, his limp hands splashing in his own warm blood. "They killed Charlie, they killed our brothers... Waste those bastards... " His voice faded.

"Ready?" The Outlaw above him spoke into a radio.

A voice squawked, "All clear."

Putting the rocket launcher to his shoulder, the Outlaw sighted on the far end of the warehouse, and fired.

Screeching into the smoke, the rocket hit and passed through the corrugated steel like paper, punching through the hurriedly stacked crates, the sheet metal and thick planking offering only enough resistance to detonate the warhead. Twelve ounces of Octol high explosive ripped apart the stacked drums of oil and the cans of gasoline, vaporizing the oil and the fuel.

The door and windows flying out, the warehouse became a single ball of flame. Anyone inside would die before feeling pain, instantly incinerated. Twisted sheets of steel floated upward in the flames.

Shielding his face from the flash, the standing Outlaw watched the warehouse disintegrate, then squatted beside the biker. But the biker was dead, drained of blood.

The Outlaw put the expended launcher tube on the biker's chest, folding his hands around it.

Then the Outlaw slipped away into the swirling smoke. Motorcycles roared to life, moved on out.

Wind tangled his hair with his beard. Horse surveyed the devastation and death. The warehouse still burned. Smoke poured from the shell of buckled, scorched sheet steel. Gutted hulks of cars smoldered in the parking lot, wisps of acrid matter drifting from blackened interiors.

At the entrance to the parking lot, Horse looked down at Charlie's annihilated squad. The four Outlaws were sprawled amongst the wreckage of their motorcycles. Their ripped bodies had stiffened in the postures of death: hands knotted over spilled viscera, faces contorted in agony as if they still screamed. A pool of oil, gasoline and coagulated blood added background color to the group.

Twenty feet to one side, a dead man embraced the tube of the expended LAAW rocket.

"Last thing he did," Stonewall said.

Without commenting, Horse strolled on. He looked down at the scabs, bones, greasy meat that had once been an Outlaw. He observed closely the eight-inch barrel of the revolver lying in ash.

"That was Banzai," he said. "I gotta talk to Turk."

Stonewall called to a group of bikers standing near the burning warehouse. "Turk! Horse here wants to talk to you."

The balding giant plodded over to his commander. Turk carried a riot shotgun slung over his back. Only two 12-gauge cartridges remained in the bandolier that crossed his chest.

"Where were you?" Horse asked him.

"I was over there." Turk pointed to a seawall on the far side of the airline terminal. "Hanging my ass over the water, covering the big door and the side facing the water."

"Did any of them get away?"

"Nothing got out. Banzai had us surround the place. Guys on the other side, guys on these sides, me covering that end. We kept shooting until the rocket hit it. And bang, it went up."

"They're not even shit now," Stonewall said, looking at the warehouse.

"Just smoke," said Turk.

"It ain't funny!" Horse's eyes were fit to kill. "We lost twelve brothers. You understand? Those locals took twelve of us with them."

Turk backed away as Horse brought up his MAC-10. "Horse, easy man. I was here. It was bad, man, it was bad! But we won. We offed them. Take it easy."

Turning his back on Turk, Horse walked to the warehouse. He shielded his face against the heat and moved closer to the red hot wall of the warehouse. He snatched up a cartridge casing and an odd bit of metal from the concrete.

"What's that?" Stonewall called to him.

"A .308 casing and a belt link for an M-60."

"No wonder they ripped our dudes up. They had a goddamned machine gun. Where the fuck did they..."

"From Chief. He had one of the M-60's. These were the locals who got the Chief. And all of Chief's men. And the Monk. And the twelve men here. Heroes. Thinking they're going to save the day, screw up our plan, protect the wife and punk kids..."

Horse angrily threw the cartridge casing and belt link into the flames. He spoke to the rising column of smoke. "This is it, heroes. You killed my men, I killed you. But that payback ain't enough. Now I'll kill your people! All of your people!"

He laughed eerily, his gaunt addict's face cavernous like the skull in flames on his jacket's insignia.

"I wonder who they were?" Roger Davis said, rewrapping his shot-through forearm. He drew the strip of hotel sheet tight and tucked in the end. He tried to make a fist, but winced from the pain.

"Whoever they were," Chris told him, "they took out a lot of creeps."

From the roof of the hotel, the youths could see only the smoke from the burning terminal. But they had monitored the pursuit and battle on the captured walkie-talkie.

"If everyone had fought like them," Roger said as he looked into the distance, "the Outlaws wouldn't have lasted ten minutes. But everyone just did what they were told..."